Security systems offer a degree of security for residential sites and for office, business, and/or industrial applications. Typically, a security device, such as a sensor or a camera, monitoring a protected area is provided as part of a security system. Such security system devices can detect the occurrence of various alerting events, such as a breach of the protected area, a fire condition, or other types of condition, and can generate alarm signals, notification and/or data indicative of the events. The signals or data are usually transmitted through wired or wireless connections to a security control panel configured for processing the alarm signals or data from the security device and for implementing other functionalities based on the processed results of the alarm signals or data, such as arming the system, disarming the system, providing system status and generating alerting messages indicative of the events, coordinating the operations of different functional modules of the system, and so on.
In addition, a central monitoring station is normally provided to communicate with the security control panel for receiving, routing and sending the messages generated by the control panel to the terminal devices of the users of the security system, notifying them of the occurrence of alerting events. The central monitoring station usually receives data from the security control panel and further processes the received data to generate alarm data. The alarm data can be in any suitable format.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram illustrating a known security system 10, which communicates with a user's terminal device 40 via an IP network 60. The security system 10 is generally configured to detect the occurrence of a predefined alert event and notify the user of the occurrence of the event through a message, such as an email or SMS.
The security system 10 includes at least one security device 20 configured to detect an event, such as a breach of protected premises, and transmit signals in response to the event. The system 10 further includes a security control panel 30 in communication with the security device 20 through the IP network 60, for processing the signals from the security device and controlling the operations of other functional modules of the system. A central monitoring station 50 is in communication with the security control panel 30 through the IP network 60. The central station 50 is capable of processing the received data to generate alarm data.
However, no extended applications of the alarm data generated by the central monitoring station have been envisioned and developed so far. Thus, it is desirable to provide extended application of the alarm data generated by the central monitoring station, for example, to produce extra revenues.